|
|
New Books to BPLD February 2026 |
|
|
|
|
|
It's Not Her: A Twisty Thriller about Two Families and a Chilling Lake Resort Crime from the Author of Local Woman Missing
by Mary Kubica
A gripping thrill ride. --Jeneva RoseTantalizing, terrifying and all too real. --Shari LapenaCancel your plans, you won't be able to put this one down. --Chris WhitakerWickedly smart and incredibly twisted. --Ashley ElstonTerrifying. --Megan MirandaTwo families at a secluded lake resort are at the center of a chilling crime in this twisty thriller from the bestselling author of Local Woman Missing A scream shatters the silence...Courtney Gray's peaceful vacation turns into a nightmare when she discovers her brother and sister-in-law dead in their lakeside cottage. Her niece Reese is missing. Her nephew Wyatt is asleep upstairs--unharmed.A town full of secrets...As police swarm the quiet resort, dark truths about Courtney's family--and the town itself--begin to surface. Is Reese a victim... or the killer?A truth no one saw coming...With everyone hiding something, Courtney races to uncover the terrible mystery. But the closer she gets, the harder it is to know who--or what--to trust.For a limited time get this deluxe edition hardcover featuring beautiful packaging and custom designed endsheets.Check out these other riveting thrillers from Mary Kubica: The Good Girl The Other Mrs. Local Woman Missing She's Not Sorry
|
|
|
|
Wolf Hour
by Jo Nesbo
Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2016. When a small-time criminal and gun dealer is shot down in the street, all signs point to Tomas Gomez, a quiet man with a mysterious past-and deep connections to a notorious gang-who has seemingly vanished into thin air. Other murders soon follow, and it appears Gomez is only getting started. Meanwhile, Bob Oz, a down-and-out suspended police officer with a dubious past of his own, becomes fascinated by the case: he is obsessed with the notion of hunting down a serial killer who only he can understand, a killer with a story as tragic as his own. Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2022. An enigmatic Norwegian man with ties to Minneapolis - a self-described crime writer - has traveled to the United States to research the Gomez case, in the hopes of writing a book about it. But as his investigation progresses, the writer's seemingly neutral position reveals itself to be more complicated than the reader is initially led to believe-- Provided by publisher.
|
|
|
|
Stolen in Death
by J. D. Robb
A violent death and a vault of stolen treasures has Eve Dallas struggling to solve crimes old and new in the next thriller in the #1 New York Times-bestselling series.A blow to the head with a block of amethyst has left multibillionaire Nathan Barrister dead--while nearby, a vault, its door ajar, sits filled with priceless paintings, jewelry, and other treasures. Lieutenant Eve Dallas's husband, Roarke--who misspent his youth in Ireland as a scrappy thief--recognizes at least two stolen pieces among the hoard. The crime scene suggests a burglar caught in the act. But only one item seems to be missing. Then it's revealed that the vault had actually belonged to the victim's late father--and no one in the household knew it was there until a recent remodeling project exposed it. To protect the family name and business, they explain to Eve, they'd been looking for a way to return the ill-gotten gains anonymously and avoid the police. But now the police are all over their elegant house, and have a bigger, bloodier mystery to solve. By all accounts, Nathan Barrister was a good man, a generous employer, a devoted husband and father. As for his father--he clearly had secrets. Now it's up to Eve and her team to find out if those secrets got Nathan killed--and if it was a crime of passion or revenge.
|
|
|
|
The Escapes of David George: An Odyssey of Slavery, Freedom, and the American Revolution
by Gregory E. O'Malley
By a prize-winning historian: The dramatic story of a Black man's relentless search for freedom in Revolutionary-era America When most Americans think of slavery, they do not picture the colonial or revolutionary eras. Yet, in fact, one of six inhabitants of the thirteen original colonies was enslaved. The Escapes of David George: an Odyssey of Slavery, Freedom, and the American Revolution reveals a remarkable, untold experience of the American revolutionary period--a Black man's quest for the freedom espoused by our Founders, but denied him and other enslaved people. In 1762, at the age of 19, David George escaped from a plantation in Virginia. Running southwest by night, fording rivers and crossing borders, he embarked on a decades-long journey in and out of captivity that spanned multiple colonies and thousands of miles. George lived among White, Black, Creek, and Natchez settlements, fled to the British Army for the promise of liberty, founded what might have been the first Black Baptist church, helped to hack a settlement for refugees out of the Nova Scotia wilderness, and died as a leader of an experimental anti-slavery community in Sierra Leone. Piecing together archival records and David George's own brief account of his life--the earliest written testimony by a fugitive enslaved person in North America--Gregory O'Malley presents a thrilling narrative and a unique perspective on our nation's origins, principles, and contradictions.
|
|
|
|
Ctrl + Alt + Chaos: How Teenage Hackers Hijack the Internet
by Joe Tidy
*A NEXT BIG IDEA CLUB MUST-READ SELECTION *An immersive, pulse-pounding expos on the global rise of teenage hackers, offering an insider's portrait of the dark net and the key players who are disrupting corporations, government institutions and our everyday livesJulius Kivimaki, aka Zeekill, is arguably the most hated hacker in history. In one of the world's cruelest cyberattacks, he blackmailed 30,000 psychotherapy patients with their stolen notes. Yet while the breach was singularly inhumane, Kivimaki's rise--from twelve-year-old hacking nuisance to Most Wanted criminal--is symptomatic of a larger trend. His story gives us vital insights into how hackers, many of whom are teenagers, find their feet and become dangerous criminals.In this gripping true crime narrative, cybersecurity correspondent Joe Tidy reveals that there is one area of the criminal underworld that is being underestimated at our peril--the dark digital underbelly where teenage boys are reshaping cybersecurity, cryptocurrency and organized crime under the noses of their parents.Propulsive, urgent and scrupulously reported, Ctrl + Alt + Chaos tracks the rise and fall of global hacking groups to ask the question: How can we stop the cycle of teenage boys hijacking life online?
|
|
|
|
The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg--And the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema
by Paul Fischer
The untold, intimate story of how three young visionaries--Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg--revolutionized American cinema, creating the most iconic films in history while risking everything, redefining friendship, and shaping Hollywood as we know it. In the summer of 1967, as the old Hollywood studio system was dying, an intense, uncompromising young film school graduate named George Lucas walked onto the Warner Bros backlot for his first day working as an assistant to another up-and-coming, largely-unknown filmmaker, a boisterous father of two called Francis Ford Coppola. At the exact same time, across town on the Universal Studios lot, a film-obsessed twenty-year-old from a peripatetic Jewish family, Steven Spielberg, longed to break free from his apprenticeship for the struggling studio and become a film director in his own right. Within a year, the three men would become friends. Spielberg, prioritizing security, got his seven-year contract directing television. Lucas and Coppola, hungry for independence, left Hollywood for San Francisco to found an alternative studio, American Zoetrope, and make films without answering to corporate capitalism. Based on extensive research and hundreds of original interviews with the inner circle of these Hollywood icons, The Last Kings of Hollywood tells the thrilling, dramatic inside story of how, over the next fifteen years, the three filmmakers rivalled and supported each other, fell out and reconciled, and struggled to reinvent popular American cinema. Along the way, Coppola directed The Godfather, then the highest-grossing film of all-time, until Spielberg surpassed it with Jaws -- whose record Lucas broke with Star Wars, which Spielberg surpassed again with E.T. By the early 1980s, they were the richest, best-known filmmakers in the world, each with an empire of their own. The Last Kings of Hollywood is an unprecedented chronicle of their rise, their dreams and demons, their triumphs and their failures -- intimate, extraordinary, and supremely entertaining.
|
|
|
|
End of Days: Ruby Ridge, the Apocalypse, and the Unmaking of America
by Chris Jennings
The gripping story of the Ruby Ridge siege, showing how the historic standoff between federal agents and a white-separatist family set the stage for the conspiracy-laced politics of the Trump era. Vivid, frightening, and fascinating...This book blew me away and opened my eyes.--Walter Isaacson, author of The Code Breaker and Elon Musk On August 21, 1992, shots rang out while federal agents were surveilling a cabin in Boundary County, Idaho as part of an operation to arrest Randy Weaver--a reclusive, mountain-dwelling survivalist--for failure to appear in court on a gun charge. When Weaver finally surrendered to the authorities eleven days later, his wife, son, and dog lay dead, as did a US Marshal. Ever since, America has been trying to make sense of what happened on Ruby Ridge. Today, the question could not be more urgent, as the shock waves from Ruby Ridge have amplified and compounded, cracking the very foundations of our democracy. In End of Days, Chris Jennings explains the significance of this historic siege by setting the story of the Weaver family within the long history of apocalyptic Christianity in the United States, illuminating the ways in which that faith has gradually transformed the nation. The strain of doomsday Christianity that gripped the Weavers, he shows, was grounded in a particular reading of biblical prophecy that can be traced back to the 1870s and up through the twentieth-century rise of Christian fundamentalism to the right-wing conspiracism that now defines American society and politics. The events at Ruby Ridge acted as an accelerant for this spreading worldview, and are essential to understanding the crisis that our nation confronts today.
|
|
|
Byron Public Library District
100 S. Washington St.
Byron, Illinois 61010
(815) 234-5107byronlibrary.org |
|
|
|